Sunday, December 30, 2012

My 2012 Booklist

My goal for 2012 was to read an average of one book per week, and I surpassed that.

My other goal was to read or reread books that have been sitting on my bookcases for decades. I did a good job with that, although many still remain. And since I have money these days, I indulged myself by buying books that sounded good in their New York Times reviews.

I think my favorite non-fiction books this year were Catherine The Great: Portrait Of A Woman by Robert Massie and The Catcher Was A Spy by Nicholas Davidoff and my favorite novels were The Secret Keeper by Kate Morton and Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn. My favorite story of how I came to read a book goes like this:

I was at the library and saw Clarence Darrow by John A. Farrell. I took it out and read it.

Darrow was of course a brilliant lawyer. It turns out he quoted poetry during his jury summations.

So I zipped on over to Amazon and looked up Nothing But The Night. I found a Bill Pronzini novel by that title. I then went online to my library's catalog and found they had it. So the day after I returned the Clarence Darrow biography, I went back to the library, found the Pronzini novel, took it home, read it that afternoon (and enjoyed it), and returned it to the library the next day.

If I hadn't read the Darrow biography, I wold never have known about the Pronzini novel. When the weather warms up, I'll go back to the library and take out some more by him. He's got a new fan thanks to Clarence Darrow.

I'm going to divvy this year's list by fiction and non-fiction, alphabetical by title. Expect to see a lot of The(s).

Now here's the non-fiction:
Alexandra- Caroly Erickson
A Magnificent Obsession- Helen Rappoport
A Smattering Of Ignrance- Oscar Levant
Belles On Their Toes- Frank B. Gilbreth Jr. and Ernestine Gilbreth Carey
Catherine The Great- Robert Massie
Clarence Darrow- John A. Farrell
Complicated Women- Mick LaSalle
Dark City- Eddie Muller
Every Picture Tells A Story- John Hedfield
Five Sisters- James Fox
Galileo's Daughter- Dava Sobel
Jack London And His Daughters- Joan London
Lonelyhearts- Marion Meade
Lost Prince- Jeffey Moussaieff Masson
Mary Boleyn- Alison Weir
Murder Plus- Marc Gerald ed.
Nutcracker- Shana Alexander
On The Verge Of Revolt- Brandon French
Party Line/ Out On A Limb- Louise Baker
Queen Of The Conquerer- Tracy Borman
Sins Of The Son- Carlton Stowers
The Astaires- Kathleen Riley
The Beauty And The Sorrow- Peter Englund
The Bronte Myth- Lucasta Miller
The Catcher Was A Spy- Nicholas Davidoff
The Gershwins And Me- Michael Feinstein
The Life Of David- Robert Pinsky
The Lost Empire Of Atlantis- Gavin Menzies
The Loyalists- Christopher Moore
The Medical Detectives- Berton Roueche
The Moose That Roared- Keith Scott
The Making Of The Wizard Of Oz- Aljean Harmetz
The Mormon Murders- Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith
The Quiz Kids- Eliza Merrill Hickok
The Secret Life Of Houdini- William Kalush and Larry Sloman
The Wages Of Sin- Lea Jacobs
The Witch Must Die- Sheldon Cashdan
The Women Of The Cousins' War- Phillipa Gregory, David Baldwin, and Michael Jones
The Youthful Queen Victoria- Dormer Creston
Things I Did And Things I Think I Did- Jean Negulesco
To Hell And Back- Meat Loaf and David Dalton
Under The Banner Of Heaven- Jon Krakauer
Vertigo The Making Of A Hitchcock Classic- Dan Auiler
What Happened To Their Kids- Malcolm Forbes and Jeff Bloch
Without Lying Down- Cari Beauchamp

I'm a bit jealous of how respectable your list is. Most of what I read this year was YA fiction. Some were gems (Between Shades of Gray is a chilling tale of Stalin's labor camps) but more than I care to admit turned out to be trashy romances only seconds after I passed the point of no return *sigh*. Oh, well.

I didn't exactly read masterpieces of contemporary literature, and now that I think about it, I didn't reread Sister Carrie, which was on my to do list for 2012. That, at least, would have been kind of a classic.

Nothing But The Night was good. It had alternating POVs, which I really enjoy, and the plot was nice and twisty.

Here's An Article From Publishers Weekly

Let's Not Forget

About Me

I decided to be a writer when I was in first grade and I've been fortunate to have lived my dream.
Among my books are Kid Power, About David, and The Year Without Michael and The Riddle Streak.
My 77th book, Blood Wounds was published in September 2011.
I'm also the author of Life As We Knew It, The Dead And The Gone, and This World We Live In. The fourth book in the series, The Shade Of The Moon, came out August 2013 and is now available in paperback.